HO LEY GROUND A helicopter whisked Louise Hose (above) and her team to the 5,000
foot-high Selma Plateau. Getting tourists up here to visit the caves would be
a logistical feat. "Omanis could build a tramway from the coast, then dig a
tunnel to the Majlis al Jinn cave," says Louise. "But it wouldn't be cheap."
entrances, lasers to calculate interior volumes,
and air-monitoring sniffers to check for harm
ful levels of gases, such as carbon dioxide. The
team's biologists will gather and analyze water
samples and inventory the flora and fauna both
above and below the surface.
Someday Oman's lucrative oil reserves will be
pumped dry, so the government is encouraging
economic diversification of all kinds-from
copper mines to cookie factories. The caves,
it hopes, could be developed into a tourist
attraction like New Mexico's Carlsbad Caverns
National Park, which generates more than 30
million dollars a year.
Following management guidelines used by
the U.S. National Park Service Cave Resources
Program, Louise's project will collect detailed
geological, biological, cultural, and paleonto
logical data, and she'll generate a 3-D map of
the largest cave. The idea of underground tour
ism might seem crazy, but she plans to give
it a thorough testing. Are the caves too danger
ous, unstable, or their ecosystems too fragile to
sustain tourism? Or could they support a new
national park, attracting sought-after tourist
dollars to Oman?
After a whirl of meetings with officials in
Muscat, Louise and fellow caver Nancy Pistole
take photographer Stephen Alvarez, his assistant
Ben Cadell, and me to the airport. We board a
jet for Dhofar, a coastal region in the south,
where Louise plans to start her reconnaissance.
The sky is perfectly clear as we soar over the
brown and yellow deserts of central Oman, but
a thick layer of clouds obscures our descent into
Salalah, Dhofar's largest city with 157,000
inhabitants. From June to September the mon
soon blows a steady drizzle in from the Indian
Ocean, making Dhofar the mildest place on the
Arabian Peninsula.
It is still raining the next morning as Ben
drives us east toward the Jabal Samhan, one of
the limestone massifs that line the coast. Louise
wants to examine Tawi Attair, the Well of the
Birds, a huge sinkhole within the massif. Twenty
miles east of Salalah the mountains squeeze
CAVES OF OMAN 45